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Rising East Online

Editorial

Carrying the torch

Phil Cohen

Counting our mixed blessings (and metaphors) before they are hatched

First the good news: By playing the ‘East London’ card to win the Olympics bid, by insisting on the area’s multiple deprivations and multicultural heritage as key to why we should get the games rather than Paris, the government has given a mandate to all those who are serious about local regeneration. Promises made previously—affordable housing, permanent, skilled jobs, the creation of a post-industrial economy in which manual workers and knowledge workers share equally in the benefits—can and should now be delivered in full.

Our mole in the corridors of power says that the idea of playing up local disadvantage as an advantage, even a Unique Selling Point—the fact that , as she put it, ‘ Paris doesn’t have an East End’, hit the bid team relatively late on, and was only adopted after considerable debate. But it was then pursued with considerable determination and flair. Sending a bunch of East End kids to the International Olympics Committee (IOC) meeting in Singapore was a masterstroke—they undoubtedly were the best cultural ambassadors we could have had, and it may have been their presence as part of Lord Coe’s charm offensive that finally did the business.

When the good news broke, everyone from David Beckham to Tracy Emin was queuing ( or was it cueing?) up to proclaim that the East End was ‘their manor’—a term which went out of common usage with the Krays, but which in some circles still evokes a certain ‘Cockney charm’. Closer to home the University of Essex suddenly discovered that the East End began at Southend (as indeed it does !) while the Vice Chancellor of London Metropolitan University could now hear the sound of Bow Bells if the wind was blowing in the right direction up the Holloway Road!

The not so good news is that following the 7/7 bombings in Central London, the original risk analysis—namely that London was no more a target of terrorist attack than Athens , will have to be substantially revised, and the cost of securing the games is likely to be far higher that first estimated. There are very real fears that the systems of surveillance now required to defend the Olympic village and main stadia against threat of terrorist attack are not only likely to put an extra burden on the taxpayer, but to create a ‘Fortress Olympics’, with all its attendant risks to civil liberties, not to mention the ‘Olympic spirit’. In particular it may put a special strain on community relations in East London.

There are two aspects to this. Firstly the influx of hundreds of thousands of affluent Olympic tourists into Stratford, an area with a strong street subculture linked to drugs dealing, hustling and petty crime, will anyway lead to the introduction of zero tolerance policing. This policy, unless handled sensitively, may bear down especially heavily on local Black and Asian youth and lead to their increased alienation. It was never going to be an easy problem to solve, but now it is likely to become enmeshed in another far more serious difficulty.

In the aftermath of 7/7 East London’s many and varied Muslim communities will undoubtedly be anxious to demonstrate their willingness to participate in delivering the 2012 Games, especially by volunteering. But all volunteers are now going to be subject to intense scrutiny in case a suicide bomber or two find their way into the ranks. If some of those in authority continue to regard ‘British Muslims’ as responsible for producing a culture which sustains religious fundamentalism, while the communities themselves are seen by others to be harbouring potential terrorists, such screening procedures, however fairly conducted, are likely to be concentrated upon Muslims and those who look like they might be. So what begins as an attempt on the part of ethnic minorities to assert symbolic co-ownership of the Games, may end by producing a legacy of distrust and exclusion amongst their most disadvantaged and marginalised elements—the very people in whose name the games have been rhetorically claimed.

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From Aspirationalism…

To recognise a problem is the first step in beginning to address it, but the very terms in which the bid has been constructed may have made this more difficult. The promotional strategy relied heavily on the idioms of New Labour aspirationalism. We were exhorted to ‘live the dream’, and in this version of it, wish fulfilment certainly was very much the name of the Games. People in wheelchairs vaulted over famous public landmarks, children made leaps of faith over Big Ben, divers (but not duckers) used the Thames Barrier as a spring board. The message was: Obstacles are there to be overcome by acts of willpower. Everyone’s a winner. Can we do it? Yes we can!

In so far as it works, and in this case it evidently did, the strategy becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. But aspirationalism can be a risky business when it is aimed at people whose hopes for a better life have in the past been raised and then dashed not once, but many times, whether by the unfulfilled promises of political parties, or by their own unrealistic expectations of what might be delivered.. Such groups can be especially vulnerable to opportunistic interventions which exploit these disappointments to promote magical—populist or communitarian—solutions. The recent election campaign by Respect in East London is an interesting case in point. And it could be argued that the 2012 campaign worked in much the same way to mobilise local support for its own Great Cause. Interestingly enough when the bid was won, the same sporting-cum-springboard metaphors were used to describe the outcome. East London was ‘pole vaulting out of poverty’; we had ‘jumped over all the hurdles’ created by racism and had taken a ‘hop step and jump’ into a new world of prosperity for all.

In truth popular involvement and individual success in sport in East London has largely been a response to blocked aspirations on the part of working class and immigrant communities. It was because they were denied access to well paid skilled or professional jobs that so many young people of Irish, Jewish, Asian and African descent have channelled their ambitions into sport and entertainment, where of course they both encounter discrimination and find themselves unwittingly underscoring popular racial stereotypes of their special ‘dispositions’. This may be somewhat less the case today, but the opportunity structures linked to the creative industries and the so called knowledge economy are nevertheless throwing up new forms of exclusion, which in many cases have superimposed themselves upon old race and class divisions, thereby complicating them. For many young East Enders, various forms of urban athleticism, from break dance routines, and skateboarding, to football and boxing, continue to provide an outlet for ambitions and energies that might be otherwise employed self-destructively. In so far as the Games, and in particular the proposed World Youth Cultures festival, provide a showcase for their talents, well and good. But this is not the same thing as constructing a ladder of opportunity which will take them out of a precarious existence and into secure, well paid employment as a base line from which to launch their adult lives.

As a result of this history, most East Londoners realise that the world is not their oyster, pearly kings or no. As devotees of Fame Academy know only too well, if there are winners there also have to be losers. Doing the business, ‘going for gold’ means capitalising on your assets to gain competitive advantage. There were, after all, no prizes for Paris coming second. Ironically it may have been this aggressive aspect of the bid that struck a chord with many East Londoners—there is a strong streak of ‘looking out for your own’ in a culture of survivalism born of hard times. Equally, when hopes are wrapped up in hype, there is a tendency to adopt a stance of cynical indifference as a safeguard against manipulation. There is an important vein of East End humour—and rap—which specialises in this.

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To Triumphalism

What may well have prompted a sense of weariness or wariness about the hectic promise of the Olympics was the way the bid was promoted as a kind of national loyalty test. The two key injunctions of the advertising campaign, Back the Bid and Make Britain Proud, were yoked together to create a pseudo-performative statement. By texting your support you were both claiming membership in the ‘imagined community’ of the British nation , and making that ‘nation’ proud of you for having done so. The act of texting was thus an oath of allegiance—a putative act of union with both Crown and Country. Those who did not do so were, by implication, traitors to the cause.

What happens when local social aspirations are first sublimated in an idealised global abstraction such as the Olympic Dream, and then nationalised in and through the ideological apparatus of a particular country’s bid? One response became all too clear in the run up to the Singapore decision. Against the background of the debate over Britain’s role in Europe, the popular press took a strongly chauvinist line; fuelled by President Chirac’s caustic comments on the quality of British food, anti-Europeanism quickly became ‘anti-French’. In reporting the IOC decision, the fact that London had won over Paris gave an added edge to the triumphalism: les Frogs out, le rostbif rules OK!

It is significant then that both the official and media response to the 7/7 bombings was to re-cycle the myth of the Blitz which was fortuitously being commemorated that very weekend. The famous resilience shown by East Enders in the face of the Luftwaffe’s bombing of the Docks in 1940—a central element in the ‘Britain can take it’ triumphalism of WW2 propaganda—was promptly restaged as a public display of Cockney/London pride in carrying on as usual. The same national spirit that won us the bid (and the Blitz) was going to win us the war against terror. But perhaps what linked these two, recent moments was something else: a manic denial of the real problems, a refusal to recognise in the swing between a day of unexpected euphoria and a day of sudden but long predicted tragedy, what was occluded by both—namely the grounding of realistic principles of hope in a proper geo-political appreciation of the context and conjuncture in and against which these principles have to be pursued.

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Building a space of public deliberation

Perhaps the most serious effect of pre- and post-bid triumphalism was to close down any real space for public deliberation and wider debate about where we are heading. It was not only the Sun and the Evening Standard who left little doubt that anyone who was less than totally enthusiastic about the Olympics plan was at best a party pooper. The government spin machine also suggested that anyone who was not ‘on message’ must instantly be counted amongst the nay-sayers. Community organisations were similarly cast in the role of being either Nimbys or Yimbys (no or yes in my back yard). Even public broadcasting with its notion of balance reinforced this binarism. The notion that people might actually feel ambivalent about the Olympics, or that suggestions for improving the bid could be motivated by a desire to both win the games and ensure that they delivered the goods, does not seem to have entered official calculations. ‘Yes but no but’ may be a recipe for indecision, or the Third Way reduced to an angry stutter, but it may also be a useful preliminary to a more thoughtful engagement with the issues.

This points to a deeper problem. The absence of a properly dialogic space has created a vacuum which has been increasingly filled by networks of political patronage meshed in seamlessly with the consultancy culture created by New Labour’s style of governance. In the feeding frenzy that is now likely to follow the successful bid, it is all too likely that in the rush to get the contracts and franchises, few will bother to question the premises or parameters of the whole exercise, or be encouraged to seek to change them in fundamental ways. Yet an important test of the character of the 2012 Games master plan is whether it is robust enough to adapt and evolve in response to changing circumstances, both local and global, and the extent to which high quality research and democratic participation are able to play a part in this. How for example should we now assess the impact of the Games, in both their preparation and their legacy, as well as the event itself? What or whose criteria of success or failure should be applied to both process and outcome? Such questions need to be widely aired, and subjected to informed, evidence-based analysis through independent research.

Barcelona is often cited as the model Olympic City, the one London should emulate. It is worth noting the role which the Autonomous University of Barcelona played in helping formulate the aims and objectives of the 1992 Games. The urban sociologists, planners and designers who combined forces to inform the City Council’s policy thinking saw this as an opportunity to create a space and time of public deliberation and debate about what a post industrial city should be about. Particular care was taken to ensure that working class and immigrant communities were not written out of the regeneration story but repositioned both materially and symbolically in the new urban geography.

The London East Research Institute (LERI) is in some ways in a similar position. We are part of the University of East London (UEL), which is a stakeholder in both the Aquatic Centre and the proposed Olympics Institute, the main legacy body. As part of the local university with a long track record of engagement in the regeneration of the East London area, we hope to make a contribution to the process. But because we have a vested interest in making the games work, that does not mean that we abrogate our academic duty to encourage and inform public debate about the direction and delivery of 2012. Quite the contrary: it means that in doing so we must rise above local self interest and consider the wider implications of the Games for the regeneration of East London, and above all Thames Gateway.

Moreover hosting the Olympics is a lengthy process lasting at least a decade. Previous Olympic cities, including Athens, Sydney and Barcelona, have only produced relatively crude snapshots of immediate outcomes measurable in largely quantifiable terms, and against mainly commercial performance indicators. Even such significant quality of life measures as health behaviour and physical activity profiles have not been factored into most of these studies, nor have differences between Olympics and non-Olympics areas or pre- and post-Olympics results. So there is a lot of work to be done. Clearly the new 2012 delivery body needs to put in place a proper research infrastructure to ensure that both the immediate and longer term impact of the Games on different groups is objectively assessed over a long period.

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A modest review of professional opinion

In the spirit of opening up both debate and a possible line of enquiry we asked a number of regeneration professionals in East London for their comments in the immediate aftermath of the IOC decision.

Although a wide range of viewpoints were expressed, the good news is that the majority feeling was one of cautious optimism. Technically the bid was felt to be largely sound and the design quality for the Olympic Stadium and Athletes’ Village very strong. Few doubted that, all things being equal, the main venues could be delivered on budget and on time; the physical legacy for East London in terms of sporting venues and recreational facilities was a major planning gain which would not be achieved by any other means. Environmentally, there were some concerns about the effects of draining Hackney Marshes, but the proposed Olympics Park was felt to be a major sustainable asset , building on the work already done by the Lea Valley Regional Park Authority. Whether 10,000 permanent jobs could really be created here, and if so whether they would be mostly be low wage, low skill in catering and hospitality, was a question raised by a number of respondents.

Most doubts were expressed about the process of delivery. There was concern about whether the new organising body really would improve substantially on the track record of London 2012 in terms of community capacity building. There were fears that the Games were driven by a globalisation agenda and were really about creating the conditions for increased inward investment in financial and business services, and possibly the creative industries; the rhetoric about the East End being ‘the world in a city’ might just be paying lip service to the notion of local civic involvement.

There were also concerns that the process of gentrification would intensify as it moves further eastwards: Stratford and possibly a part of Canning Town may now be consolidated into ‘cultural quarters’ along the lines of Spitalfields and Hoxton , with the Royal Docks evolving into a down river version of Canary Wharf. This might be accompanied by the further displacement of lower income families into Essex and / or by the emergence of new forms of poverty and exclusion amongst those who remain.

Finally there were serious worries that the Olympics would suck in resources in such a way as to distort or diminish the wider regeneration project that is Thames Gateway. The Lower Lea Valley is just one of fourteen zones of change—and having the whole process driven by what is happening in just one area is, as one correspondent put it, a bad case of the tail wagging the dog. Equally, as another put it ‘enclaves of relative prosperity amidst poverty are no more acceptable a definition of mixed development than islands of deprivation amongst middle class affluence’.

To end on a more positive note, many were optimistic about the nature of the partnerships that have developed amongst the five Olympics boroughs in putting the bid plans together. If this could be built upon going forward, then we might see a proper framework of democratic deliberation being developed in relation to delivery of the Games.

We will be following up this straw poll with a more systematic questionnaire survey as part of our contribution to a longitudinal impact study. The study will be drawing on LERI’s established methodology and network of focus groups and key informants across the five Olympic boroughs to assess the impact of the games on a whole age cohort as the regeneration process unfolds over the next seven years, and then continuing for a further three years to assess the legacy. This will be the first in depth study of the Olympics effect, taking full account of both local and global factors and as such we hope will provide the basis of a final reckoning. We will be reporting on the progress of this research and related LERI initiatives in a dedicated website : www.olympicswatch2012.org which we hope will be up and running from October.

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In this issue

In the meantime we kick off this issue of Rising East with a short report on a pilot for the larger Olympics impact study which was carried out in partnership with Leaside Regeneration. This focussed on the impact of the bid itself on the aspirations and anxieties of both young and older groups of East Londoners in the period immediately before and after the IOC decision. A fuller version of the report will be published in September and will also available in a downloadable format from our Olympics Watch site.

The second report in this issue is produced by our student journalist team and is not directly related to the Olympics but looks at what happens when local arrangements are over-ridden by the forces of global capital. Our reporters investigated the furore caused by Newham Council’s proposals for the development of Queen Street Market in East Ham. The covered market is a key feature of Green Street, and a vibrant example of the kind of multicultural economy which has developed in East London over the last twenty years, a form of spontaneous grassroots regeneration which is often cited in the academic text books, but rarely used as a practical model by local planning authorities.

The proposal by international property developers to introduce a large supermarket as part of a general refurbishment of the physically run down site, was bound to arouse local anxieties, not only amongst the market traders, but the wider communities whom the market serves, and who depend on the availability of diverse foods which are uniformly cheap. Yet no site characterisation or impact study was carried out and the public consultation process, including a badly briefed MORI poll, has been far from exemplary. Nevertheless, as shown by our team of reporters, the issues are not as simple as slogans about ‘black and white unite and fight the evil property developers’ would indicate. Newham is a poor borough, struggling to deal with areas of multiple deprivation, and needs to strike deals with private developers to deliver planning gains for the whole community. Handled sensitively the Queen Street development could still do this. We will be following this story as it unfolds, so watch this space.

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The Cultural Turn

In the first issue of Rising East Online (RE-OL) we examined some of the possibilities and problematics of the International Olympics movement and of the London 2012 bid (see archive). In this issue we both pursue some aspects of this enquiry and take a step back to situate the Games in the wider context of the cultural turn in urban regeneration and its relation to London’s spectacular eastwards growth over the last decade.

In his keynote essay Raymond Minichbauer locates the cultural turn in the trajectory of what he calls ‘Post Fordist’ regionalism: the abandonment of redistributive measures by the state and the development of endogenous cultural assets to increase competitive advantage in a globalised and de-regulated knowledge economy. He stresses the role which European-wide cultural policies have come to play in reinforcing some forms of local advantage and attenuating others.

The Dutch urban planner Han Meyer, in a public lecture staged recently by LERI

(the full text of which we will publish in our next issue) sounded a caveat about the effects of such policies which is very pertinent when considering the cultural legacy of the 2012 games:

Experience world wide shows that unless we are very careful, the current cultural turn in regeneration leads to a privatisation of urban space and activity. This arises not just from the commercial exploitation of cultural trends—the growth of so called creative industries—but also from the way this trend is being supported and promoted by local authorities. New cultural festivals and facilities, the new designs for ‘public space’ are focussed on certain target groups, such as affluent visitors and tourists , and exclude other less affluent groups, including refugees and the poor. The question is whether this is an inevitable concomitant of globalisation , or the effect of planning policies that can be changed.

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A Pretty Terrible Part of Town?

Many of these concerns are currently focussed by the way ‘East London’ has been appropriated and represented in the Olympics bid. On the day the International Olympics Committee visited East London, one of the London 2012 bid team was interviewed on the Today programme (BBC Radio Four) about what the Games would do for East London. ‘Well, it’s a pretty terrible part of town’, he said, ‘and if we get the Olympics we will turn it into a place where everyone will want to go and live’. CNN reporting the success of London’s bid described the area as ‘grim and barren’, its people ‘desperate for hope’, and as ‘the London the rest of London has forgotten’. A BBC radio comedy programme announced that London was, of course a great city, pity about the East End. ‘We’ve got nice, and we’ve got rubbish’, was how one of the comedians put it.

Such statements are based on a stereotypical view of East London which is all too familiar to those of us who have lived and worked in the area over the past decades: in this exaggerated account, it is a lowlife place, somewhere decent citizenry tend to avoid and which has nothing to offer visitors except an excursion in slumming. But if it can be given a makeover, by plugging in world class cultural facilities made accessible through an improved transport infrastructure (and now of course the Olympics) then it becomes an area ripe for gentrification, and can be put on the international tourist map as a site of ‘colourful’ heritage.

What is truly terrible about this part of town is what it has been made to represent to the rest of the world, namely some kind of ‘foreign country’ where ‘people do things differently’ in a way that at once makes the area a source of middle-class fear and fascination, and frustrates their well intentioned efforts to make it into a place where they might feel comfortably at home. The slow drip (or is it trickle down?) of such misplaced attitudes has served to drastically undermine local cultural confidence. And confidence is exactly what is required to engage proactively with the agenda for change now mandated by the Olympics

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East meets East

In a special themed section, we situate these views within a longer historical perspective. Phil Cohen, in the first of a two part study, traces the genealogy of such attitudes, tracing the long shadow of Orientalism and its role in shaping the Anglo-Gothic imagination of East London as a medium of the urban uncanny and the ‘Other Scene’. The story starts with the Gothic realism of slum fiction produced by Victorian urban explorers such as like George Sims and Arthur Machen; it then moves onto the romantic ruinologies composed by writers and artists searching for a ‘sublime ‘vision of urban decay and ends with a re-appraisal of the discourse of post-Second World War urban reconstruction. The article reads much of this literature with one eye and ear open for its echoes in a new style of cultural tourism whose groundwork is being laid by contemporary writers and commentators when they portray East London as a ‘Cockney Siberia’, a post-industrial wasteland, or a new urban frontier.

In some ways the ‘gothic’ model compliments the more conventional approach to promoting a positive image of the area : bigging up East London’s heritage as the site of a vibrant multicultural society. The risk is that in the rush to project a picture of social and racial harmony, much that is more problematic about the area’s history is airbrushed out of the picture. History often proceeds by its bad and sad side You cannot understand what kind of place East London is today unless you understand the history of its social conflicts, its labour struggles and strikes, the campaigns against racism and fascism waged against their local supporters, and the long term effects of discrimination. We need a fully developed heritage and tourist strategy for East London, one which gives visitors a multilayered story about the areas past present and future, not a sanitised populism in which everyone is either a good guy or a fall guy.

Against this background, RE-OL offers two contributions which reconsider the politics of multiculturalism in East London, focussing on the new Rich Mix Centre in Bethnal Green. Ashwani Sharma, a member of the Rich Mix board, examines some of the wider conceptual and political issues involved in establishing this multi-million pound initiative; and director of the Centre Keith Khan talks to Munira Mirza about its cultural policy and artistic direction.

Last but no means least we publish the winning entry in our short story competition on the theme of Downriver. The author, Betty Nigianni, is a young architect with a wonderful eye for matters misplaced (in this case, shoes), and with a nod or two to some of the East End writers discussed in this issue, she tells the story of what might not have happened if the wearer had only known why their sneakers were so smelly!

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Plan Views

In this section of the journal we include a number of short position statements on different aspects of cultural policy as it touches on East London and its present and future regeneration, again in some cases with special reference to the Olympics .

Geoff Mulgan draws out some of the political implications of the Thames Gateway plan for sustainable communities. His contribution focuses on recent debates about what we need to do to tackle persistent rigidities in local labour and housing markets to build capacity in East London. Fewer urban task forces and more joined-up policy thinking where it counts, on the ground, is his recommendation—and this must surely be a recipe for the strategic inter-borough collaboration that will now be needed to deliver the Games.

Andrew Calcutt examines the role which ‘culture’ has come to play in mediating—and sometimes immediating—material contradictions and the social conflicts which arise from them, especially conflicts around race. New Labour’s Cultural Turn has, he argues, to be understood in this context. Karina Berzins looks at the development of Cultural Tourism and its role in London’s economy, and at how the move ‘Downriver’ is being recognised—or not—in the way the Capital City is being marketed as an international visitor destination.

The cultural programme proposed for the London Olympics is by any standards a rich and imaginative mix of different strands of official thinking about the relation between the arts, popular culture and community development. It is here that the local and the global cities are to be segued together in a single circuit of public celebration. Yet it is hard to imagine the likes of Billy Bragg, Benjamin Zephaniah or Dizzie Rascals, to name only three of East London’s firmament of cultural stars, staying ‘on message’ for long! David Powell, the chief consultant on cultural strategy for London 2012, discusses some of the key issues that had to be worked through in designing the programme.

The section concludes with Angus Ritchie, one of the leading figures in the London Citizens’ Campaign on behalf of low paid service workers, discussing its implications for the 2012 Olympics. The campaign succeeded in negotiating a compact with the Mayor of London to ensure that proper training and decent wages are on offer, and he argues that this provides a basis for local community organisations and trade unions to ensure that each and every one of the promises contained in ‘Leap for East London’ is delivered in full.

Finally there is some satire to spice the argument and analysis. Captain Nemesis takes another hard look at what is behind the Thames Gateway spin machine. Our resident cartoonist, Jinx, takes on the creative Class and readers get to make up their very own ‘Sudoku’ version of the ‘Regeneration game’. Readers also may like to contribute by emailing us comments on any other articles, the best of which we will publish in our new ‘feedback’ section—send your comments to risingeasteditorial@uel.ac.uk.

To end on a personal note, the issue editor is grateful to Bryan Loughrey, who chaired the Creative Writing competition, for bringing a poem by Pablo Neruda to his attention. Time, Neruda writes, has lost its shoes/ a year is four centuries. Certainly the period between the initial gestation of this issue and its final appearance has been longer than anticipated—if not quite four years! We apologise to our readers for its late arrival, partly due, as we hope you will appreciate, to the need to respond adequately to recent events. We are currently re-organising the journal to streamline the production process and now plan to publish three times a year. The next issue will appear in late October, under the editorship of Andrew Calcutt, with further issues appearing in March and June. A new prospectus for the journal has also been produced and is available on the LERI website: www.uel.ac.uk/londoneast

Read at another level Neruda’s poem offers a useful counterpoint to the spin which has dominated the last few months, whether during the general election campaign or around Live8. So let us give the final word to a poet who had little time for hype, and all the time in the world for an altogether different currency of human exchange, one which returns us to a certain vision of what the London Olympics might just deliver:

Let us not fill our mouths
With so many faltering names
With so many sad formalities
With so many pompous letters
With so much of yours and mine
With so much of signing of papers
I have a mind to confuse things
To unite them, bring them to birth
Mix them up, undress them
Until the light of the world
Has the oneness of the ocean
A generous vast wholeness
A crepitant fragrance

Phil Cohen is executive director of the London East Research Institute where his main responsibility is developing a funded programme of scholarship in the community with special reference to the Thames Gateway Regeneration Plan.

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© 2004·05

“The notion that people might actually feel ambivalent about the Olympics, or that suggestions for improving the bid could be motivated by a desire to both win the games and ensure that they delivered the goods, does not seem to have entered official calculations. ‘Yes but no but’ may be a recipe for indecision, or the Third Way reduced to an angry stutter, but it may also be a useful preliminary to a more thoughtful engagement with the issues”

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